Forever wanting to learn more, I decided to take another shot at outputting something to a VGA monitor.  On September 10th, 2015, I sat down and compared the datasheets for a few of the microcontrollers I had on hand, and made a decision.  When I got it working, I was disappointed with the results.  So I sourced another microcontroller in the same family that would allow for higher resolutions.  I also used timer based interrupts for the synch pulses, so that I could run other commands and change the image according to a user input.

Some of the VGA projects you'll see online are limited to 8 colours (basic RGB) but I knew I could do better.  Using a fourth bit would allow an "intensity" for each colour, thereby making 16 colours.  Once I got it to display something on the screen, I did some quick math and found out I only had a display area of 63 x 29 pixels of drawing space.  So I found another PIC18 chip and downloaded the program.  With substantially more memory, it allowed for almost 8 times the drawing area.  After that I converted the delays between pulses to be interrupt driven, so the CPU had less down-time.  This allowed the CPU to be doing something else while a synch line was held high or low.  In other words, user input can control what's on the screen, and something like Snake or Pong is now possible.